‘An End to Journeying’: thus the often-cited, era-defining title – part injunction, part lament – of the first part of Claude Lévi-Strauss' Tristes tropiques, his seminal anthropological memoir (and, indeed, travel account) of his years in South America. First published in 1955, it was translated from French into English by John Russell in 1961 with the substantially inaccurate, and thus all the more telling, title of A World on the Wane. The combative, exasperated, self-chastising opening sentences – ‘I hate travelling and explorers. Yet here I am proposing to tell the story of my expeditions’ (Lévi-Strauss 1976: 15) – launches an invective of superb disdain against the ‘vogue’ for a kind of travel book in which ‘platitudes and commonplaces seem to have been miraculously transmuted into revelations by the sole fact that their author, instead of doing his plagiarizing at home, has supposedly sanctified it by covering some twenty thousand miles’ (1976: 16). The distancing critique is in part the anxiety that ‘the truths’ anthropologists seek ‘only become valid when they have been separated from this dross’ (1976: 15). But it gradually gives way to the singularly eloquent yet broadly representative tristesse of travel and its discontents in late modernity. ‘Journeys,’ Lévi-Strauss writes, ‘those magic caskets full of dreamlike promises,’